New Hayao Miyazaki anime for Tokyo’s Ghibli Museum has spring debut date announced

Here’s the exact day you’ll be able to reserve tickets that will let you see Miyazaki’s Boro the Caterpillar.

There’s never really a bad time to visit Tokyo’s Ghibli Museum. The shrine to the anime of the Hayao Miyazaki-founded animation studio features beautiful architecture, fascinating art displays, and even tasty refreshments year-round, and its policy of capping admission by time block means that you don’t have to worry about avoiding crowded dates.

However, there are still some times that are better than others, because the museum has a theater which plays Ghibli short anime which can’t be seen anywhere else, with the specific title rotating more or less monthly. Usually, I’d recommend timing your visit to coincide with a screening of Mei and the Kittenbus, the follow-up to Miyazaki’s beloved classic My Neighbor Totoro. But as enjoyable as the Totoro sequel is, there’s now an even better option: the brand-new Miyazaki-directed Boro the Caterpillar, which will premiere at the museum this March.

Talk of Boro first surfaced in 2016, three years after Miyazaki announced his retirement from feature-length filmmaking following the release of The Wind Rises. Since Miyazaki is now famous and influential enough to take as much time on a project as he wants, there was much speculation over when Boro would be ready for audiences, and the Ghibli Museum has quietly released a statement on its website that the first screening of the 14-minute anime, for which Miyazaki also wrote the script, will take place on March 21.

The website describes the anime with:

Just before the dawn breaks, Boro the caterpillar hatches from an egg in the grass.

The morning sun, the first he’d ever seen, was dazzlingly bright, and he drew in his first breaths of the delicious air of the world. He climbed down to the surface, where other caterpillars and hostile creatures were, and took his first steps upon this earth.

Admission to the Ghibli Museum is available only by pre-purchased ticket, and March tickets will go on sale February 10. Demand is likely to be incredibly high, seeing as how Boro is likely to be the last animated Miyazaki work until his feature-length How Will You Live? debuts in 2020 (at the earliest). Luckily, instead of the standard one-month run for anime shorts at the museum, Boro the Caterpillar will be showing until August 31.